Andrea H. Beller, The Effect of Economic Conditions on the Success of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws: An Application to the Sex Differential in Earnings, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Aug., 1980), pp. 379-387

Women began to enter nontraditional occupations at an increasing rate at the same time federal equal opportunity policy was strengthened. In 1972, equal employment opportunity (EEO) policy was strengthened and expanded, and equal opportunity in education became federal policy for the first time. These policies constitute a two-pronged attack on sex discrimination because they address impediments to mobility on both the demand and supply sides of the labor market. Together, they should increase women's access to nontraditional jobs and to the skills necessary to perform them. During the 1970's, women made occupational gains that are concentrated disproportionately in the white-collar occupations. One explanation for this is that the impact of federal equal opportunity policy differs across schooling levels. In Section I, I discuss federal equal opportunity policy. Section II contains empirical evidence on the direct effects of EEO policy on sex differentials in earnings and occupational segregation by sex. Section III presents estimates of changes in the effect of schooling on women's entry into nontraditional occupations during the 1970's, and attempts to determine what portion may be due to equal educational opportunity policy and to indirect effects of EEO policy.

This paper uses CPS data to analyze gender differences in black-white annual earnings trends over the 1970s and 1980s. We find that in at least two respects black women fared better than men over this period. First, due to decreasing relative annual time inputs for black males, but not black females, black women experienced increases in both annual earnings and estimated wages compared to white women, while black men gained only in terms of wages compared to white men. Second, since the gender earnings gap among whites was narrowing during this time, as black women's wages rose relative to white women's, they also made faster progress relative to white males than did black males. In other important respects, however, the experience of black men and women over the period was similar. First, for both groups, while earnings and wages relative to whites of the same sex rose during the 1970s, they stagnated or declined during the 1980s. Second, in contrast to the 1960s, younger blacks did not fare better than older blacks during the 1970s and 1980s. While in 1971, both unadjusted wage ratios and adjusted earnings ratios were highest within each sex group for labor market entrants, by 1988 these ratios were fairly similar across experience groups.

Single-parent female-headed families are a large and growing proportion of all families and comprise a disproportionately large share of the poverty population. However, among these father-absent families, those who receive child support payments have higher incomes and lower poverty rates. Unfortunately, many eligible women have no child support awards and many with awards do not receive full payment. With low earnings in the labor market and difficulty finding inexpensive quality child care, many mothers have no choice but to rely on the welfare system. The incidence of poverty is far greater among single-parent families headed by women than among other types of families. Of the 8.8 million women with children present and father absent in 1985, 2.8 million had incomes below the poverty level.' The absence of child support is a significant contributory factor. The poverty rate in 1985 for women not having child support awards was 49 percent; for those who did, it was 21 percent. Among those women awarded child support, the poverty rate was 18 percent if they received payments and 27 percent if no payments were received. As these figures suggest, securing more child support from absent fathers should help to alleviate poverty among single-parent families and may help to reduce the welfare rolls. Recent interest in improving the nation's child support enforcement system was sparked by the 1980 Census Bureau's release of alarming statistics on nonpayment rates. These statistics showed that, in 1979, only 59 percent of mothers with children from absent fathers had child support awards. Among those with an award and due payment in 1978, only about half received full paymentapproximately one-quarter received partial payment, while one-quarter received no payment at all. Moreover, payments that were made were often irregular. The average amount of child support (conditional upon receiving support) was only $1800 for an average of nearly two children. The situation was considerably worse than average for black mothers and never-married mothers. Only about one-third of black mothers had child support awards and among those that did, the award amount was about 18 percent lower than for nonblacks (see our 1986 article). Only 11 percent of never-married mothers had awards. Award amounts were less than half as much as for divorced mothers.